A Room of One's Own & Three Guineas. Virginia Woolf

      Four

       Table of Contents

      That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could have written poetry then. What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing ‘the arrant feminism’ of Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that time would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

      How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,

       And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;

       Debarred from all improvements of the mind,

       And to be dull, expected and designed;

      And if someone would soar above the rest,

       With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,

       So strong the opposing faction still appears,

       The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

      Clearly her mind has by no means ‘consumed all impediments and become incandescent’. On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the ‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do—which is to write.

      Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

       Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

       The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

       They tell us we mistake our sex and way;

       Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,

       Are the accomplishments we should desire;

       To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,

       Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

       And interrupt the conquests of our prime.

       Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

       Is held by some our utmost art and use.

      Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:

      To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,

       For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;

       Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

      Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:

      Nor will in fading silks compose,

       Faintly the inimitable rose.

      —they are rightly praised by Mr Murry, and Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated those others:

      Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain;

       We faint beneath the aromatic pain.

      It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She ‘must have’, I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:

      My lines decried, and my employment thought

       An useless folly or presumptuous fault:

      The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:

      My hand delights to trace unusual things,

       And deviates from the known and common way,

       Nor will in fading silks compose,

       Faintly the inimitable rose.

      Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have satirized her ‘as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling’. Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his TRIVIA showed that ‘he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one’. But this is all ‘dubious gossip’ and, says Mr Murry, ‘uninteresting’. But there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so unwisely, ‘the dull manage of a servile house’. But she became diffuse, Mr Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting, her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage. ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms… ‘ Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose,